Personal Data Ecosystem – Creating an Open Personal Cloud Community

Session Topic:' Creating a Personal Cloud Community

Thursday 5F

Convener: John Light, Kaliya Hamlin

Notes-taker(s): Judy Tuan

Why did you come to this session?

• seemed the most interesting

• what does “personal cloud” mean?

• Identify what we're going to do with pdec (what does it to, and how does it relate to the other orgs doing work here?)

• trying to understand the personal cloud space, collectively where people think they're going (in terms of next steps) after this conference (in the next six months). Find patterning/overlap and connect. Carnie labs (learning technology) – student and learning efficiencies. Consumer of products that would be developed here. Want identity and tracking services as part of a suite (instead of

• community (john)

• because I missed all the other Kaliya sessions

• future of user-centric identity & personal clouds

• fascinated with personal cloud tech, want to see who's building stuff, integrate with the one I like the most

• Kaliya made me come

• Kaliya: worked really hard in the last ten years on these topics. How do we support the good things that we all believe in happening faster? How do we support a mix of organizations and business models and strategies for those companies? Organizing the resources to convene and bring people together: how do you sustain that glue that connects the pieces to make stuff happen? Questions about how to navigate moving forward. Also: really concrete next steps. What are the core problems we want to get solved? What community infrastructure should we set up tomorrow?

• Roadmap / learn

• more talking. I like community. Make sure we don't end up in little silos. Share information and actually use the stuff!

• Continue the conversation after we leave here. One of the key things pdec can help with

• communities share values and also resources. Purely peer to peer environment: makes sense to have p2p currencies, and p2p pretty much everything. If people are going to own their data, no need for the intermediaries. Fitting all the pieces of the puzzle together to have a vibrant ecosystem, and people feel empowered to do whatever they want with their personal cloud. But one company can't do everything for all people, and there needs to be synergy between the pieces!

If there are different strategies to get to an outcome, then what did you envision?

• partnership. Share customers. Example: my customers need storage, your customer needs currency to trade between each other.... we should all be specializing. What's going to be the standard holding us all together so everyone can talk to each other?

• XDI is important: secure protocol for information/data sharing

• if there are other options, small communities can choose different protocols and the larger community can't talk to each other. But hopefully we can build a p2p environment where we can all talk to each other

VRM (vendor relationship management)

strategies for a couple key things

• how are we growing the userbase? Adoption.

o do we want to grow a community of people who want to adopt it but can't yet because it doesn't exist yet?

• Homebrew computer club spirit – would love to see this happen in more places. Linking them together / viable ongoing strategy

• how do we create interop? Early winter in London: brought the companies in the consortium together to talk about interop. Convo about hosting some interop jams: let's meet and figure out what interop looks like and how we're going to get there in 2 months, 6 months. Is the time right to do this?

• How do we get funding into this community? Companies, but also time and attention for people to organize and support it.

Funding

• identify people who need or want this tech and are just dealing with what we have now because that's the best there is

• growing spirit of people who aren't happy with the status quo

• indiegogo? Etc

• get commitment from people before the things are actually developed.

• What are the things that we could crowd-fund? There's R&D....

o Here was a lively discussion: some say “research can be crowd-funded,” others say “no, that's not sexy enough for the end user” or “no, i'd rather build something with that money.” Kaliya mentions there've been other conversations about what it would mean for corporate money to come into the research area of what we want to accomplish here.

o or we could ask the users what they want.

• Pure utility of having a single login

What's the best way of keeping in touch?

• Mailing list. Archives are public: http://lists.pde.cc/lists/arc/personal-clouds

What we want: hand the user something and say “have fun”

There are a lot of great projects here. A lot of interop comes down to data formats. If we can read and write to the same data stores, that's powerful. One possible answer: semantic graph.

• federated social web summit: bring together projects and leaders and do interop

• work with federated web people, have a focused “we're hackers, I’ve got something, I want to make it work with the neighbors” and get them in a room together

• pros/cons of semantic graph stuff? Other ideas?

• Should we have this as a theme for one of the personal cloud meet ups? They're monthly. http://www.eventbrite.com/org/3106466104

• There's also “build the collaborative internet” in SF: http://www.meetup.com/Build-the-Collaborative-Internet/

What is the http://pde.cc/ ?

• Membership fees: $150 in garage, $1000 if angel, $5000 if venture-funded.

• By next week we'll have 50 companies (we have ~40 now).

Purpose of http://pde.cc/

• pay for people to go to the events and represent our side, get the word out to entrepreneurs

• infrastructure for community meetings and getting people together who are building stuff

• providing a counterweight to nstic. They have people full-time; we don't.

• When you do lift your head up from coding, you don't want to waste your time.

• If you're a pdec member, you get my time and attention (helpful filter for other companies)

• there is a role for totally open community. And fostering open-source projects. Coordinating role to support this

• crowd equity funding is gonna show up soon

Volunteer development is leadership development. Recruiting volunteers == leadership.

We're inviting people who want to blog once a week or once every two weeks. We need to manage volunteers. What do people want to volunteer to do?

John drew a picture on the board: there are people here working on each piece. We need interop. People say: “oh, that's all!” People say: “no, this is spot on”

Drummond: this is the first IIW where instead of being pulled into conversations about high-level stuff, people are saying “i want to use this with that right now!” Maybe by next IIW we'll be seeing some of John's picture come together.

What do we solve in interop?

• Doc: do mobile location privacy. Tons of policy and regulation around it. One of the biggies.

• Sarah A: an instance of a personal cloud that a consumer would find useful and easy to make use of.

XDI? Is this an open question still or have we settled on it? Honestly, I have no idea how to build things on it. If there were a Ruby wrapper on top of it, that would be enormously helpful.

• or a personal recommendation engine

• what is the CRM tool available in an equivalently easy way as wordpress is available that they can get it installed and email people not through constant contact? Sugarcrm. Civiscrm? (Drupal)

• Kevin from Salesforce is going to lead the initiative to build a connector in the next six months? Haha

• change of address

Activity tracker

• if you can build this tool, this is in huge demand in enterprise

• who knows what, is good in what area

• a lot of this is in peoples' heads

• how are we serving the community? But also people want this

Idea: Personal cloud hackathon! Two weeks before the Napa conference